Linguistics and Education: An International Research Journal, v18 n1 p24-40 Spr 2007

Although microteaching has been found to be an effective way of helping preservice teachers learn about what it means to teach and while students themselves find it useful, researchers have not yet examined the task itself to discover exactly what it means to "microteach," thus the purpose of this study was to learn more about the interactional structure of the task. The results of discourse analysis that was performed on 22 videotapes of microteaching showed that the question of how to frame the task was a constant challenge to the students, who must simultaneously negotiate the roles of teacher, student, classmate, and peer/friend. Analysis of the tapes, as well as of questionnaires in which participants described their perception of the activity and explained how they approached the task, reveals that microteaching resembles "performance" or "classroom task" to a much greater extent than it does ''teaching.''